Mrs. Pargeter's Principle

by Simon Brett

  She looked across to the immaculately-suited Napper Johnson. ‘How is Helena, by the way? Not too traumatized by her recent experiences?’

  ‘She’s a wonderfully resilient woman,’ he replied, his smiling face tinged with something like a blush. ‘Obviously, so far I have only had a brief meeting with her, but I get the feeling she is going to be a very congenial person to keep under protection.’

  ‘Good,’ said Mrs Pargeter with an answering grin. Then she turned back to Kelvin. ‘And while you were transferring Truffler and Erin’s stuff, did you get a chance to see much of the rest of the house?’

  ‘Not really. It was just in the front door, through the hall to the back room. Time and again until I’d got it all stowed.’

  ‘And you say you were set up for the job by Edmund Grainger?’

  ‘That’s what he called himself. And he was certainly the guy in the photograph Truffler showed me.’

  ‘And was he in the house on the Saturday night when you delivered the stuff?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So who was there?’

  ‘Couple of heavies.’

  Truffler Mason thrust across a still taken from the CCTV footage of Holy Smirke being abducted from in front of St-Crispin-in-the-Closet. ‘Those two?’

  Kelvin screwed up his eyes. ‘Could be. They were about the same size, but I didn’t really get a good look at them.’

  ‘And in the house,’ Mrs Pargeter said, pressing on, ‘did you hear any sounds?’

  ‘What kind of sounds?’

  ‘Well, human sounds. I mean, was there anyone else in the house?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why, what were you thinking, Mrs Pargeter?’ asked Napper Johnson.

  ‘Just that if they’ve got this house down there, south of the river, they might use it as a storage space for other things apart from stolen archives.’

  ‘Human things, you were thinking?’

  ‘It’s a possibility.’

  ‘Like a kidnapped vicar?’ Napper suggested.

  ‘It’s a thought.’

  ‘It certainly is.’

  ‘Right,’ said Gary, who was getting a bit bored with all this talk and wanted some action. ‘When are we going to break into this place?’

  ‘I think tomorrow morning would be favourite,’ said Truffler.

  ‘Dawn raid?’ asked Gary excitedly.

  ‘Dawn raid,’ Truffler confirmed.

  ‘Just like the old days.’ Gary chuckled with satisfaction.

  Mrs Pargeter looked serenely bewildered by his words.

  ‘First thing is,’ said Truffler Mason, spreading a large scale map of Battersea across the table, ‘to work out what we’re up against.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’ asked Erin.

  ‘Well, Kelvin only saw two blokes, but there may be more of them. Edmund Grainger might be back there. We don’t know. Also, though we’re hoping to surprise them, they seem like quite an efficient line-up. And we don’t know whether they’re armed or not. Did you see any weapons, Kelvin?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean they don’t have any. And from the impressions I’ve got of the kind of villains they are, I think they probably will be tooled-up. Better have the shooters, Gary.’

  The chauffeur nodded, making a mental note of the instruction. ‘What do you reckon about cars, Truffler?’

  ‘Think we might need two. Those terraces have got little gardens or yards round the back. We’ll need to cut off the escape route that way.’

  ‘OK. Well, I’ll drive one, anyway. And I suppose I could get one of my drivers to—’

  ‘No, Gary. We don’t want to let anyone new in on this. Security risk.’

  ‘I could drive the other car,’ suggested Kelvin.

  Truffler looked at the young man for a moment, then said, ‘Yes, why not?’ Then he had second thoughts. ‘Just a minute, though.’ He looked around the group. ‘Saturday night this Herbert was cleaning out my office, not to mention Erin’s place. He’s changed sides rather quickly, hasn’t he?’

  ‘I will vouch for him,’ said Mrs Pargeter. And that was that.

  Truffler looked at his watch. ‘Schedule’s pretty tight because we haven’t cased the joint properly yet. We’d better get on with that as soon as possible.’

  ‘Do we really need to do that?’ asked Gary. ‘I mean, Kelvin’s already been inside the place.’

  ‘Yes, but you know how insistent Mr Pargeter always was about preparation for a job.’

  ‘But there’s other ways of doing that kind of stuff today.’

  ‘Is there?’ Truffler didn’t like the direction in which the conversation was going. He was a traditionalist. He reckoned that if the late Mr Pargeter had a way of doing something then that was the way it should still be done.

  ‘Erin’ll show you, Truffler,’ said Gary.

  On cue, the girl started flicking her fingers over the screen of her tablet. ‘We can check the place out on Google Maps.’

  This they did, though Truffler didn’t think it was as good as doing a proper recce. He expressed his displeasure by taking copious longhand notes on the positions of doors, windows and other possible emergency exits.

  When that was done he said, ‘Right. Let’s think what else we need. Getting into the place … They’re going to have pretty substantial security locks. Pity we haven’t got time to bring in old “Keyhole” Crabbe. He’s the master with the picklocks and that. He’s—’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Kelvin interrupted. ‘I can deal with any locks we’re going to come up against. Back in the days when I was a burglar …’ In other words, yesterday, thought Mrs Pargeter ‘… I taught myself the lot. And I did notice the kind of locks they’d got on the front door when I was carrying all the stuff in. Kid’s stuff. I could crack those with a bent hairpin.’

  ‘Good. So let’s just confirm who’s on the team. How many of us are there going to be? You up for it, Napper?’

  ‘Well, normally I’d say a very definite yes. But in this case I am a little worried about the safety of Lady Winthrop. One of my junior staff is protecting her at the moment, but I feel this is a job that I should really take on personally, given the level of jeopardy she is in.’

  Mrs Pargeter raised an eyebrow, but made no comment. Napper went on, ‘In fact, I think I should be getting back to her right now. My junior staff are good, but not that good.’ He looked round at the assembled plotters. ‘Good luck with the dawn raid.’ And he left.

  Mrs Pargeter had a moment of disquiet. This was only the second time she’d met Napper Johnson, but from what she’d heard about him from Truffler his withdrawal from the proposed raid seemed out of character. She felt a momentary twinge of suspicion. Was Napper on their side or not?

  But Truffler showed no signs of anxiety as he continued the planning meeting. He looked across at the chauffeur. ‘You’re in obviously. And if things get dodgy we might be glad of your getaway skills, Gary.’

  ‘Always at your service.’

  ‘Now, Kelvin, you’re in, aren’t you? You’re going to be very useful to us because you know the place …’

  ‘Ye-es.’ The young man looked confused.

  ‘What’s your problem?’

  ‘Well, the thing is, having so recently decided to give up burglary, I’m wondering whether I should be immediately involving myself in what, when you come down to it, is just another burglary.’

  ‘This is not a burglary,’ said Truffler patiently. ‘It is a reacquisition of stolen property.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right then,’ said Kelvin. ‘I’m in.’

  ‘And I’m obviously in.’ Truffler let out a sound that could have been a laugh or a groan. ‘Apart from anything else, I want to reclaim the contents of the Mason De Vere Detective Agency.’

  ‘And I want to be there for the same reason: to get my stuff,’ said Erin Jarvis.

  Gary disagreed. ‘It might be risky, Erin. If the shooters come out, you could get hurt. You wait
till we’ve made the place safe, then you can come in and collect your stuff.’

  ‘I want to be there,’ the girl reiterated with such force that no one argued with her any further.

  Truffler Mason looked across at Mrs Pargeter and said slowly, ‘I’m afraid I don’t think you should be there, Mrs P.’

  ‘Why? I’m not afraid of—’

  ‘I know you’re not afraid of nothing. But the fact is that, though we know what we’re doing is entirely kosher, there are some people who might regard breaking into a house as an act of burglary.’

  ‘What kind of people?’

  ‘The police, for instance. We’re good, we won’t make much noise, but in a suburban area like that, there’s always the danger that some Neighbourhood Watch nut sees something suspicious and summons the boys in blue. I wouldn’t like you to be caught in circumstances like that, Mrs P. I would hate for your name ever to be associated with something that could be interpreted as criminal.’

  She was disappointed, but she knew that Truffler was speaking good sense.

  ‘We’ll report back to you the minute the job’s done,’ he reassured her.

  ‘You do that,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t matter how early. You call me as soon as you’re safely inside.’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  She thought it was worth one more try. ‘I’d really like actually to be there, though.’

  ‘No,’ Truffler said firmly. ‘It is very important that you’re not there for the raid. What you don’t see, Mrs P, you don’t know about.’

  ‘Ooh,’ she said. ‘You sounded just like my husband then.’

  Mrs Pargeter had decided she would spend the night at Greene’s Hotel. Hedgeclipper Clinton kept a suite ready for her at all times. So after saying goodbye to the others in the foyer, she took Kelvin by the hand and led him through to the bar. ‘Someone I want you to see,’ she whispered.

  Inside the lighting was subdued, most of it coming from low candles on the tables. 1930s jazz murmured from the speakers. Sammy Pinkerton, a champagne bottle in a bucket on a stand beside her, looked fabulous in the candlelight. It airbrushed away the redness that was still around her eyes and picked up the sheen of her black hair, at the same time finding the sparkles of her champagne glass. A matching glass stood empty at the place opposite her.

  She didn’t look directly at her former fiancé, but addressed Mrs Pargeter. ‘Is it true?’

  ‘Yes,’ came the comforting reply. ‘He’s given up crime completely.’

  ‘I’m going to become a cop,’ said Kelvin.

  Sammy looked at him in amazement, then turned to Mrs Pargeter for elucidation.

  ‘No worries, love. Take it slowly. Kelvin’s got a lot to tell you.’ Mrs Pargeter took the champagne out of its bucket and filled the empty glass. She gestured Kelvin to sit down in front of it. Which, awkwardly, he did.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Sammy, on the edge of bewildered tears.

  ‘Kelvin’ll tell you.’ As she spoke, Mrs Pargeter put down on the table between them the key to another of Greene’s Hotel’s luxury suites. ‘You won’t want to be going all the way out to Essex at this time of night.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Sammy asked again, a little plaintively.

  ‘What’s going on,’ Mrs Pargeter replied, ‘is that you and Kelvin are going to get married at Girdstone Manor on the twenty-seventh of May. One small change, Sammy. You won’t be becoming “Mrs Stockett”. You’ll be becoming “Mrs Mitchell”.’

  ‘What?’

  But there was no answer to Sammy’s question. Mrs Pargeter was already on her way to her suite, feeling rather better at the end of the day than she had at the beginning.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The dawn raid, when it happened, was a bit of a damp squib. Not in the sense that it wasn’t successful – nobody could ever have asked for a smoother job – but the level of opposition for which they had prepared did not materialize. They certainly didn’t need to use the guns which Gary had produced from the glove compartments of his black 4 x 4. (He was always very thoughtful about which vehicle he used for which job, and he’d never thought the Bentley would be suitable for a dawn raid. Much better something with all-terrain possibilities.)

  The dawn raiders had met at four thirty outside Truffler Mason’s office and driven in convoy to Lavender Hill. Kelvin, knowing all too well how much clobber he would have to shift back to where he had stolen it from, had got one of Gary’s team to deliver a Transit for him to Greene’s Hotel at four o’clock. (He’d snuck out of his suite, leaving Sammy deeply asleep, with everything once more wonderful between them.) He’d driven Erin to Battersea while Truffler went with Gary.

  When they got to the target house the Transit was parked round the back, while Gary stopped the 4 x 4 directly in front. Then Kelvin walked round to work wonders with his picklocks.

  The front door gave inwards and, cautiously, guns at the ready, Truffler, Gary and Kelvin entered the hall. But the anticipated firefight did not ensue.

  In fact, what happened was the one thing they hadn’t planned for. They met no resistance at all. The two heavies Kelvin had met on the Saturday night appeared blearily at the foot of the stairs and, seeing three armed men in front of them, immediately ran towards the back of the house and access to the garden.

  From inside the Transit van, Erin Jarvis saw them flinging themselves over the garden wall and running away as fast as they could go. There was nothing she could do to stop them.

  (In fact, when he later wrote up a report on the incident, Truffler Mason had a lot of criticisms to make. Their planning of the dawn raid had been seriously inadequate. If the two heavies had come at them with guns, the outcome could have been very different. And what use was Erin going to be sitting in the Transit waiting to cut off any escape out of the back of the house? No, Truffler Mason felt rather bad about how hasty their planning had been. If a similar situation came up again, he would insist that everything was done exactly as the late Mr Pargeter would have done it.)

  But the moment that they had broken into the house and seen off its occupants was not the time for recrimination. Kelvin took Truffler to show him where all his precious files were stowed. Then he fetched Erin from round the back to reassure her that her archive was safe too. Both she and Truffler looked delighted to be reunited with their possessions.

  And then Kelvin began the laborious process of putting back into the new Transit all of the stuff that he had so painstakingly taken out of the other Transit in the small hours of the Sunday morning. But he didn’t make any fuss about the task. He regarded it as a kind of necessary penance – part of the process of transition from lawbreaker to lawkeeper.

  The terraced house appeared only to have two stories. There was no obvious access to an attic or cellar. The successful intruders searched all the rooms. Truffler helped himself to a couple of laptops and all the files he could find. ‘Tit for tat,’ he said. ‘If they’re going to help themselves to our archive, it’s only fair that we should take theirs.’

  But they didn’t find anything else of particular interest in the house.

  They were standing in the empty front room when a very sweaty Kelvin poked his head round the door. ‘All done,’ he said. ‘The Transit’s loaded up.’

  ‘Right.’ Truffler took out his mobile. ‘I’d better just ring Mrs P and tell her everything’s OK.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ said Erin. ‘I can hear a television.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can hear a television.’

  They were silent for a moment. Truffler, whose hearing wasn’t as acute as the girl’s, couldn’t hear anything. Gary thought he possibly could, but the sound was more likely coming from next door. ‘I lived in a terrace once. You could hear the neighbours changing their minds.’

  ‘No, listen again,’ said Erin.

  Once again they were silent. Then Erin said, ‘It’s coming from downstairs. Definitely. There’s someone down there.’

  Th
ey made another, more meticulous, examination of the ground floor. Truffler moved along the walls of the hall, rapping on them with his knuckles. It didn’t take long. While most of his taps produced a dull thud of flesh against brickwork, there was one whole panel that echoed the space behind it.

  Gary and Kelvin helped as they tried to shift the blockage. At first nothing happened. Then Truffler had the idea of lifting the panel slightly. Instantly, it came free. They slid it along the wall to reveal the staircase leading down. The door at cellar level was locked, but Kelvin’s instruments made sure it didn’t stay that way for long.

  He pushed the door open to reveal a very grumpy-looking chubby man in a cassock.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Truffler. ‘We’re not going to hurt you. We’re all friends of Mrs Pargeter.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ said Holy Smirke. ‘I knew you’d come eventually.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  The vicar pointed upwards. ‘Well, obviously, I prayed for it, didn’t I?’ He looked up at the ceiling. ‘Mind you, you took your time answering my prayer, didn’t you, God?’

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Gary.

  ‘Well, I’m as all right as anyone can be when they’ve been locked in a cellar for the best part of a week.’

  ‘Did they hurt you?’

  ‘Not physically, no.’

  Truffler was instantly alert. ‘What, you mean they hurt you mentally? Brainwashed you?’

  ‘No, no, no. It was almost as bad, though. They just left me in this room with only that telly for company.’ He gestured towards it disparagingly. ‘Have you any idea how terrible daytime television is?’

  TWENTY-TWO

  Mrs Pargeter was immediately rung with the happy news of Holy Smirke’s rescue, and she undertook to pass it on to the anxious Ernestine in the flat behind St-Crispin-in-the-Closet.